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Little is known about Alan's background, including why he became a sexual sadist. What is known is that he worked as a tow-truck driver and first started killing women in 1989. He also alternatively raped several women in the early 1990s, becoming known as "The Crestview Rapist". Sometime in or prior to 1994, he met his future wife Judith. The two married in 1994 and then began killing for reasons unknown together, murdering a total of ten women by 2010. However, during the latter years of that sixteen-year span, Alan felt emasculated by Judith, who was demanding, and this prompted him to rape and kill other victims outside of Pennsylvania. In 2008, Alan raped a woman named Hannah Franklin alone and apparently tried to kill her, but she survived the attack. In 2010, Alan tested positive for a sexually-transmitted disease (contracted from one of the victims he killed alone), which caused him and Judith to stop killing together, but he continued to kill without her. Their marriage became even more strained, and they eventually started seeing multiple marriage counselors; by 2014, they were seeing Doctor Kathleen Benedict, who specialized in insight therapy. These methods caused them to rediscover their love of killing together, thus motivating them to start killing again. However, Alan secretly disapproved of Benedict, feeling further emasculated from taking advice from a woman.

When he killed with Judith, Alan would usually pick up Caucasian female hitchhikers or drifters from rest stops or gas stations. He would then take them to a motel he and Judith were staying at, where the two of them would shelter them and get them to take a shower. Once they emerged from the shower, Alan would then blitz-attack them by strangling them from behind with his own belt. He would allow them to breathe intermittently before finally killing them. Afterwards, he and Judith would have sex. The victims' bodies would then be wrapped inside a shower curtain from the motels by Judith, to which they would then be dumped off the side of a highway. In the case of James Crayton, his sole male victim, he allowed Judith to pick the victim. Whenever he killed alone, Alan would operate in multiple states to prevent authorities from connecting his crimes. He raped the victims (who were targeted randomly) and also stab them. His first victim was stabbed to death, without any indication of being strangled beforehand. No details were revealed about the rapes he committed during his time as the Crestview Rapist.

Alan seems to be based on Paul Bernardo and was even compared to him by the BAU. Both were prolific serial rapists outside strangulation murders that they committed with their wives, though unlike Judith, Karla Homolka was aware of Bernardo's other activities.

Alan is also extremely similar to Gary Ridgway, a.k.a. "The Green River Killer". Both were prolific serial killers and rapists who usually targeted high-risk women, killed their victims by strangulation (though Alan also killed by stabbing), and had a sexual component in their crimes (Alan raped some of his victims or would kill his victims for a sexual thrill; Ridgway engaged in sexual activities with his victims). Also, Alan giving his wife his last victim's necklace is an allusion to how Ridgway gave his victim's jewelry to his female coworkers.